Field Trip to Landschulheim Steinmühle
Next Wednesday, we won’t be meeting in class but we’ll take a field trip to a local school (Landschulheim Steinmühle) to observe the practical use of New Media in a real life classroom situation.
There are two questions that are really intriguing to me and that I want to find an answer to during our field trip.
1. How is the technical equipment financed at “Steinmühle”?
2. Do the students themselves see an advantage in using New Media in class?
I am not sure if I’ll find an answer to the first question because I would have to be able to talk one-on-one with one of the students. However, they might not answer truthfully because for them I am “on the other side” – being a teacher soon 
But we’ll see and I’ll do my best!
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Hello there 
Since this weeks technical lesson seems to be learning how to edit posts, I thought I start by uploading the picutres I took during our fieldtrip and write my real article later…
Enjoy the pictures!
As you can see above, my questions for our fieldtrip concerned the financial aspects of new media in the schools and the student’s stance on this topic.
Both questions are easy to answer in this article. The first one is easy because we asked one of the teachers and got a straight answer to it: “Steinmühle” is a private school so most of the money comes from the “Schulverein” who is also the employer for all the teachers. This is a very special situation because we do not have a lot of private schools in Germany. Moreover, the school also receives funding from the state (thus our taxes are paying the equipment) and receives donations from local or big companies once in a while. That was pretty much the answer I expected.
As far as the second question is concerned, I did not find an answer because I did not get a chance to talk to students. I misunderstood the goal of the fieldtrip and thought we would go to observe the use of New Media in a classroom. In that case, my question would have made more sense since that would have given me the chance to ask the students when their teacher isn’t around.
Still, there is a lot to say about our fieldtrip that has nothing to do with the questions but that I would like to share with the readers of this blog.
I really liked that we went on a fieldtrip to “Steinmühle”. Especially in this course (New Media in Foreign Language education), it seems very important to see the theory acted out in reality, because a lot changed in the field of technology and New Media since our own school days. Hence, it was necessary for me to see that there is a beamer in nearly every classroom and that there is enough equipment to use the New Media with a whole class. The “Steinmühle” seemed to be very well equipped. Although they only have one computer room, the presence of laptop-terminals seems to enable teachers to use modern technology whenever they want to.
I also liked that “Applied Computer Science” is a mandatory subject in grades 6 and 7 and strongly recommended in most of the other grades. I was surprised but happy to hear that the students learn a safe handling of instant messengers, social networks and shopping on the Internet. That’s just great! Honestly, this is so much more important than knowing Java!
Moreover, I was very impressed with the LAZ (working room for teachers). That is why I uploaded the picture of the sign on its door . It is so important to give teachers a place to work in their free time and those little desks with computers are just a perfect environment to work! At my old school and at most of the schools I taught as a substitute teacher, there was only one room for the teachers and there weren’t even enough chairs for all of the teachers… You had no chance at all to get some work done. This is actually very sad because most teachers have free periods in between their lessons that they could use to correct papers or prepare their next lesson.
I also liked a lot that teachers seem to receive training on using the laptops – at least for the technical part. That is an important issue because I think that you cannot expect every teacher to know how to use modern technology. Especially older teacher, who did not grow up with computers, have to invest a lot of time in wrapping their mind around this new way of teaching without being paid for their work.
Nevertheless, there is also one negative point about this fieldtrip: I still don’t know what students really think about using the New Media!
I have to admit that I do not believe what the teachers answered about the fact that the students don’t abuse these lessons for checking emails. I have noticed that every teacher seems to be either oblivious to cheating going on around him, or is ignoring it on purpose. I interpret that as a healthy self-protection because you go crazy if you take every attempt of cheating for serious as a teacher, and I don’t exclude myself from this phenomenon. But still, students are smart! You can see in your teacher’s face if he is checking the supervising-the-classroom-computers-application or if he is working on something himself and wouldn’t notice if you peek into your email account really quickly… Maybe the whole point is, that it doesn’t really matter if students trick a little bit whenever they are in the computer room. But I start to get annoyed by everybody just claiming it’s not happening. I don’t believe it!!!
Anyways, this couldn’t take away from the good experience which our field trip to the “Steinmühle” was, and I am glad that I got to see a school where computers seemed to be well integrated in the curriculum. J
